Eros, Borne of Chaos
by NeoVenus22
Summary: PROO. How quickly the Rangers in the field forgot that Andrew sat there every day, watching battles and worrying. [complete]


Disclaimer: No one mentioned belongs to me.  
Author's Note: For the purposes of this story, it should be noted that Mack is 19 and Rose is 24.

* * *

Andrew Hartford was on edge even before he got Mack's frantic, bleated message. How quickly the Rangers in the field forgot that Andrew and Spencer sat there every day, watching battles and worrying.

Most of the time, their worries were rooted in nothing tangible. But then Mack called in, "We've got trouble. It's bad. I think we need a doctor," and Andrew's stomach bottomed out. He'd seen the attack launched on the Megazord, something akin to a ball of fire careening into the machine with a huge explosion. But in the ensuing smoke, he hadn't seen which Zord in particular had been hit.

The relief he felt knowing Mack was okay was palpable, but it was brief. There were others in that Zord, people he had come to consider friends, almost family. People he cared very much about. People that were his responsibility, people he had asked to join this team and risk themselves. They'd all lived in a bubble, blissfully unaware of just how much they'd end up risking.

Dax came in first, followed by Ronny's frizzy blond head. She always seemed most frazzled when she came back to the base, whipping her helmet from her head in a sea of flyaway strands, with a terrible glitter in her eyes. She didn't have it then, only worry, as she cast anxious glances behind her. Even the normally unflappable Dax looked edgy, creases appearing around his eyes and mouth to reveal an anxiety Andrew never would have believed of him.

Mack and Will brought up the rear, stumbling from carrying Rose's dead weight between them. Her dark hair spilled over her face, hiding her pale features, but there was no disguising the deep gash penetrating her uniform.

Andrew flocked to their side, helping the boys lower her onto the cot Spencer had brought out. Ronny had already run to grab the first aid kit. "How bad is it?" one of them asked, maybe it was Andrew himself.

"We don't know. She was knocked out the second we got hit," Mack reported. He'd calmed down considerably since he'd first reported in. "She's pretty banged up."

Ronny undid the front flaps of Rose's jacket and pushed the sleeves back to expose Rose's black tank top. The slash started at her navel and stretched clear across her flank. Andrew stepped back to let Ronny and Spencer go to work, trying to ignore the knot building in his gut. This was his fault. He'd been the one studying Rose's scholastic exploits for months. He was the one who decided the team needed her expertise. And Andrew was the one who went to all the trouble of recruiting her.

He'd expended twice as much effort researching Rose as any of the others. He'd become fascinated by her accomplishments and skills, enamored by her love of history and her knowledge of myth that exceeded even his own. She'd proven to be something of a fascination to Andrew, igniting in him something he'd long since repressed.

"If I may, sir," Spencer spoke up, cutting through the haze of Andrew's thoughts and striking his attention. "Miss Ortiz needs to go to a hospital."

"She's not waking up," Will added unnecessarily, his voice shuddering slightly with concern.

"It'll be okay," Mack assured him. "It's Rose. She's strong. She'll fight it."

"Yeah, how do you know that?" scoffed Ronny.

Mack shrugged. "I just do."

Andrew wrapped his arm around his son's shoulders tightly and nodded the wordless command at the rest of the team.

* * *

A pair of thin, soft arms wound their way around Andrew's shoulders and neck, squeezing with gentle pressure, before a hand came to rest possessively on his chest. "Are you still working?" the owner of the hands breathed in his ear.

"Rome wasn't built in a day. This cartouche won't be translated in a day, either," he chastised, but her fingers trembled against his chest as he laughed. Suzanne swept down and kissed his cheek.

"Is this the one you picked up from that dealer in Belize?" she asked. It wasn't feigned interest; she always made a point of peppering him with questions about his passion, though she rarely understood.

Andrew nodded. "The hieroglyphs look Mayan in origin, but I think it's actually a more obscure dialect."

"Have you sent it to some of the geeks at the Academy?"

"I'll get around to it," he hedged.

Suzanne's laugh always served to set a fire in his stomach. "That's my Andrew. You'd much rather figure it out for yourself, before you have to defer to someone else's genius." She brushed her lips across his forehead, cradling his jaw with her hand. "There's nothing shameful in asking for help, Andy."

Andrew flushed with an impossible wealth of love that couldn't be contained even by this massive house. He dug his fingers into her hips and pulled her down onto his lap before crushing her to him in a kiss that was anything but polite.

"I should come down and distract you more often," she sighed when he released her. "Dinner's just about ready, you know. Can you take a break?"

"I suppose."

"Oh, come on. Even the brilliant must occasionally stop to eat," she chastised. "Get some dinner. I made meat loaf." Andrew cocked an eyebrow and Suzanne's smooth features crinkled in a giddy giggle. "I know, I know, it's pedestrian."

"Only for your skills, sweetheart," he said. Suzanne's skills with a spatula were second only to her skills with a paintbrush. She could whip up any number of unusual dishes to entice his imagination.

"But it's your favorite. And I have to do _something_ to keep you from running off all the time."

Andrew had to grin at that, because it wasn't as though Suzanne just sat at home staring at the walls until he came back. Archaeology wasn't her field, nor was anthropology, but she liked to come on digs anyway. She'd take pictures of landscapes for future reference at work, then she'd spend the rest of the day sitting in a tent, reading a book and occasionally brushing dust from her lap. She'd look up when he pushed in, her eyes bright and her lips spilling questions about his latest finds.

He followed his wife into the dining room and nearly collided with little Mack, running circles around the dinner table making airplane sounds. "Hey, buddy," Andrew said, scooping Mack up in a big, spinning hug. "Fight any bad guys today?"

"Monsters!" Mack enthused. "Big ones!" His small face pursed with seriousness. "But don't worry, Dad. I beat 'em."

Andrew nodded with equal gravity.

"I bet you did," Suzanne said, coming over with an oven mitt on one hand and a metal spatula in the other. She bent over and kissed Mack's head, then out of fairness, planted one on Andrew's cheek, as well. "My big, brave adventurers. Eat up, replenish your strength." Andrew put Mack back down and Suzanne put her spatula between the boy's shoulder blades to nudge him gently towards his chair. "You can save the world again tomorrow."

* * *

Andrew had the lurching sensation of overestimating the number of steps in a staircase, of hovering over bottomless nothing, before everything crashed down with excessive force. Rose coughed three times, then blinked at him from under heavy eyelids. "Andrew."

He didn't trust his voice at the moment, so he just smiled and muttered, "Hi."

"How long?"

"A few hours."

Rose nodded in contemplative acceptance. "How many until I can get out of here?"

"Don't know," he answered, falling into an embarrassingly gentle tone. Spencer was out dealing with paperwork and Andrew had sent the other Rangers home to clean up and maintain normal operations. There was no sense in all of them being there, taking the entire team out of commission.

"Did anyone think to get my book out of my Zord?" she asked.

Andrew laughed in spite of the circumstances; only Rose would take books into a Zord with her. She was just like him in that respect. He never went on a plane without at least six books in his carry-on. Not just light material either, but enormous academic tomes. "I'll have Spencer see to it," he said. He should have asked about the battle. He didn't think he really wanted to know. "What were you reading?"

To his surprise, her face tinted pink. "Um, your book, actually."

"Bit of light reading?" he joked. The text he'd finished right before the whole Corona business had begun was a heady, unrestrained piece of work discussing all of his major digs and discoveries of the last ten years. And there had been quite a few.

"It's fascinating. You're so... you would have made a great Ranger," she said, then focused her attention on the bland watercolor of unrecognizable flowers perched crookedly on the wall. Andrew recalled this idle chat from a few months ago.

"Thanks," he said automatically, and threw in the prerequisite but honest, "not as good as you, though."

"Yeah, this is a real badge of courage," she said, waving at the general area of her stomach where her scar would be, although it was hidden under her hospital gown and hospital sheet.

"I'm sorry about all of this," he said, before he had the chance to rethink whether or not it was a good idea to say it. "Putting you in the line of fire like I did."

"You just asked. I didn't have to say yes." Rose said it with an easy, lazy grin, to reassure him she wasn't placing blame on anyone but the monster who had decided to fling a ball of fire at the Megazord and ruin her afternoon. Andrew wanted to give her a hug for this, but instead he just hovered uselessly at the end of her bed.

"Sit down," she said dismissively. "I don't bite."

He pulled up the lone chair obediently, but didn't so much as sit in it than perch awkwardly at the edge with little balance and less support. "You're sure you're all right," he pressed, more worried than he had any right to be.

"A little achy, but they have painkillers. I don't think I'll be up for any hand-to-hand combat for a few days, but you put some ancient mythos in front of me and I'll study the crap out of it."

Andrew laughed and grabbed her hand without really thinking about it. The gesture was familiar and much needed.

"So," Rose continued, eyes glittering in the harsh fluorescent lights, "I was just getting to the chapter on your visit to Iceland. But I bet it's better first-hand."

"I don't know about that."

She nudged her fist against his arm. "Don't sell yourself short. C'mon, regale me with dramatic tales of dramatic adventures."

"Hmm. You sure you wouldn't rather hear more about Mjolnir?"

"And miss out on the better parts of my Indiana Jones fantasy? Never. C'mon!" She grinned somewhat mercilessly. Something unwound in Andrew's stomach, looping out messily with no hope of recoiling.

* * *

Suzanne wrapped herself firmly around Andrew's torso and touched her forehead to his. She was tall enough to do that, which he'd always weirdly found attractive. "Don't go running off to the jungle," she pleaded, her words ghosting air across his lips. He hated the way she always implied that his travels were somehow him 'running away' from things, but he drove the thought from his mind as Suzanne's fingertips dropped just below the waistband of his jeans promisingly. "You'll get mauled by a jaguar."

"The only jaguars I'm planning to run across are of the stone variation," he assured her, and jutted out his jaw for a sneak-attack kiss. It was a lazy type of kiss, slow and with tongue, which he never got to do anymore, for fear of Mack screaming out "ewww!" at inopportune moments. She tasted like the grape juice she consumed by the gallon. Andrew loved the combination, the bittersweet nature of wine, but juvenile in the absence of alcohol. An innocent sort of maturity; he thought it fit Suzanne nicely. "I'm just going down to research a statue Dominic found," he said. "I'll be back in two days."

"Mmm," she said thoughtfully, planting a brief, smacking kiss on his lips. It was the affectionate but casual sort that Andrew didn't mind, but found was showing up more and more these days. "Just enough time for me to plan a welcome-back party."

"With cake?" he asked, twirling ribbons of her long hair around his fingers, trapping her in his grasp. Or him in hers. It was hard to tell sometimes.

"Maybe. Of course, if a jaguar shreds your innards into tiny pieces, it won't really be that much of an issue, will it." She stiffened against him. "Don't go, Andy. What if something happens?"

Andrew couldn't help but roll his eyes at this claim; she made the same argument every time he made trip plans. "Nothing's going to happen. I'm going with a guide who is well-trained and knows the area better than anyone. I'll be fine, I promise."

As it turned out, he'd kept his promise. He stayed out of harm's way for the entire trip, until the very last day, when he returned to Yenna's bungalow and discovered he'd gotten a phone call while out. It was Spencer. Something was wrong. Andrew was to come home immediately.

Spencer collected him at the airport, alone. The sick feeling in Andrew's gut and the chill dancing the length of his spine for the duration of the entire flight intensified when Andrew touched down and saw his butler himself standing in the terminal with the prim 'Andrew Hartford' sign he usually sent the chauffer with, even though Tom had worked for the family since Mack had been born and he and Andrew recognized each other easily. Spencer looked unusually drawn, although he still managed to be polite and proper as ever.

"Mack is fine, sir," Spencer said off the bat, which was only a small relief. Andrew could actually feel the blood rushing out of his face, although where it went, he had no idea, as he'd gone numb. "Suzanne?"

"There was an accident, sir. It didn't seem right to say over the phone."

Andrew nodded. He had questions, but was too scared to ask. At the moment, he was suspended in a bubble of not knowing how much, how bad. He didn't know if getting specifics would make the situation any better, but he decided one question was enough for now: "Is she okay?"

"I'm afraid not, sir."

Andrew closed his eyes to stop the airport from swimming around him. "Oh, God."

"I'm so very sorry, sir."

"Take me to her."

"Right away, sir."

Spencer, as it turned out, hadn't come alone. Tom was waiting outside with the car and they'd brought one of the servants to go to all the trouble of picking up Andrew's luggage so he wouldn't have to bother.

The drive to the morgue started off with a few simple words: accident, instantaneous. After that, Andrew stopped listening to anything Spencer said. Spencer got the hint and gave up trying to fill in blanks.

"She died pretty much instantaneously, Mr. Hartford," the morgue assistant told him. "There wasn't any pain."

Suzanne's face was dusted with elegant purple shadows. She looked like a surreal dream, like one of the times she'd brought stage makeup home from work, and painted herself and Mack up to act out whatever book in which he was currently immersed.

But the neat line of a sewn-up cut running down the stretch of her jaw tarnished the illusion. Who even knew what had happened to her body under the serene pale blue of the medical sheet. Andrew dragged his thumb over the ragged facial blemish, thinking that even that made her look beautiful and dignified. Death couldn't change the very essence of the regality Suzanne always had to her.

His head rattled and rang with the last thing he'd ever said to her: "I'll be fine." Hasty words in the airport, a quick kiss, then boarding the plane and immediately becoming immerses in an archaeology journal. It had been a quick comment, intended only to reassure her, but in the end, he realized how selfish it had been. A means to stop her worries and nags, and something of a curse reversed. He'd declared his own immunity to danger, and had passed danger onto her.

* * *

"Aren't you _bored_?" Mack was asking when Andrew stopped in front of the guest room that had become Rose's office.

Rose laughed. "Hardly. This break means I get to catch up on the work I've been missing. This thesis isn't going to write itself."

"Don't you ever read for fun?" Mack said.

"Fiction doesn't have to be the only thing that's fun, Mack."

"Take collections of Celtic legends, for example," Andrew said, coming into the room and holding out his peace offering. Rose was sitting at her desk with a pen in hand, Mack was perched cross-legged at the end of her bed. They both looked up expectantly at his arrival, and he felt a little bad about interrupting whatever pseudo-team-bonding they'd been working on. "Since you finished my book, I figured this was a good follow-up. Dr. Rothman is the best authority you can find on the subject."

"His book?" Mack said, looking back and forth between them. "You mean you actually read that frontal assault weapon Dad calls a textbook?"

Rose shrugged. "It was fascinating."

Mack got to his feet, un-pretzeling his body smoothly. "Well, if that's the direction this conversation is headed, I think I'm going to leave work at the office. I'm gonna go find Dax and make him play foosball with me. Not much thought there."

"Hey, Mack," said Rose.

"Yeah?"

"Thanks for checking up on me."

"No problem. Just proving myself right. I was telling everyone that you'd pull through." He grinned cheerfully at Rose.

"And they didn't believe you?"

"Not everyone is burdened with the same overabundance of faith as Mack," said Andrew.

Mack cocked his head and studied Andrew slightly. "No, not always," he said. "But hey, accidents happen. There's nothing you can do."

Andrew stepped aside so Mack could get through the doorway, and when he was reasonably sure he heard the footfalls fade down the hall, he closed Rose's door almost all the way. "How are you feeling?" he asked, dropping Rothman's book on the corner of her desk.

"Good, actually. A little achy."

Andrew had half a desire to offer his services in rubbing her shoulders, but repressed the urge. Instead, he sat stiffly on the edge of her bed, letting the post at the foot of it brush against his knee. "I'm sure Spencer has some sort of physical therapy routine in mind."

"What, you couldn't be bothered?" she said. "I think he takes this team more seriously than you do." Andrew opened his mouth, maybe in protest, or defense, he wasn't sure which, but never got to find out, because she was grinning at him. Teasing.

She came over and sat next to him. "You know, it's so cliché."

"What?" Andrew couldn't stop the hints of a smile threatening to part his lips.

Rose rolled her eyes, flopped back on the mattress with her legs hanging over the edge, bent at the knees. It wasn't a comfortable position, regardless of one's physical status. He wondered if maybe she was faking the 'achy' claim, to get more time with the books and to work on her thesis. It didn't seem like something Rose would do. Then again, at the same time, it seemed exactly like something Rose would do. Andrew wasn't going to ask, and moreover, he wasn't going to tell.

"It's completely cliché and sad that I'm Rose and I'm the Pink Ranger." She poked his back, the only part of him she could reach. "Didn't really stretch for that one, did you?"

This time, he bypassed the smile completely in favor of a bursting, fully-formed laugh. "Okay, so maybe it was a little uninspired."

"A little?"

"Really now. All the time I spent designing suits that would enhance one's genetic abilities, and you're complaining about color-coding?"

"I'm not diminishing your efforts, Andrew. And pink is my favorite color, incidentally."

"See, all part of my master plan."

"I'm sure." To his relief, and the cramps-by-proxy he got just from looking at her, she sat up. She backed to the center of the mattress, crossing her legs Indian-style, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. "At least you didn't color-code the rooms."

"That would be awful," he agreed. He remembered how when they'd first bought the place, Suzanne had been alight with the notion that she could go through and decorate every room, using her endless trove of paint supplies to create elaborate settings and themes. _There would be a jungle room_, she enthused, _and an ocean room, and for my favorite explorer, Ancient Rome_.

"Andrew?"

"Yes?" Andrew stared at her without blinking, not really expecting to see Suzanne, but not entirely anticipating seeing Rose, either.

"You're thinking about her, aren't you. Your wife." She wasn't accusing, or even hurt, and he was grateful.

"Yes. She painted set designs, you know. She was always splattered in paint, all over her clothes, her skin, her hair... She barely even noticed." He closed his eyes, swept up in the memory of messy Suzanne, streaked and splattered and cracking up. "She was always so animated. She loved her work. The place was always littered with set pieces. I'd go off around the world, to jungles and ruins, but I'd always end up coming home to even more fantastical worlds. "

"She sounds great," Rose said. "Did she ever paint this room?"

Andrew was abruptly jerked back to the present, to the stark reminders of his wife's death. "This room? No. I built this wing after she died. I was going to turn the estate into a boarding house, maybe sell it to the college for a dorm. It didn't make much sense, keeping this big house. It was just me, Mack, and Spencer."

"It's really nice of you to let us stay here."

"Yes, well, you're saving the world. The least I can do is provide accommodations."

"And weapons, and vehicles, and special genetically-enhanced suits..."

Andrew laughed a little out of instinct and rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes to clear his head. Rose placed her hand on his shoulder, small but warm, grounding.

"I wonder what she would have thought." They never actually mentioned Suzanne's name

"She never understood my job," he confessed. "I never really understood hers, for that matter. All that time, painting details on pieces of wood that would just get destroyed later."

"What, you've never studied ruins?" said Rose.

"I suppose," he said. "I don't know, Rose. Sometimes I feel like I never got to know her at all."

Rose didn't say anything.

"I was never here," he continued, the words spilling out of him faster than he could realize what they were. Like Mack used to do. "There were always deadlines for work. Papers to write, legal battles over dig sites, trying to submit my book before my colleagues. I just assumed that my marriage, my family, didn't have a deadline. I wasted the little time I had with her."

It wasn't as though Andrew expected Rose to have the perfect catch-all phrase to salve his pain. This was a lot to lay on any person, much less a person with whom one had a working relationship and a tentative actual relationship. Unsurprisingly, Rose didn't have the perfect thing to say, she just took his hand. Surprisingly, Andrew gained a considerable measure of comfort from that alone.

He sat like that with her for a few minutes longer, then got to his feet. "I've got to go check on Spencer," he said. "He's running some diagnostics on your Zord."

"Is it going to be operational soon?" She didn't seem to find his retreat offensive.

"About the same time that you are," he said, and grinned at her. "Enjoy the Rothman book."

"Yep. Thanks for stopping by."

It was probably going to set of the alarm on her cliché meter, but it was a sincere sentiment, so he said it anyway. "Thank you." Rose nodded in quiet understanding and Andrew left, shutting the door behind him.

* * *

In the weeks after Suzanne's funeral, Andrew was greeted with a series of changes in the estate, most of them unpleasant. The mansion was like a tomb, cavernously empty. There were no paint splattered clothes in the laundry, there was no one humming along to the radio. Andrew let most of the staff go; the sounds of them keeping busy only served to amplify the lack of Suzanne in the house. At least in the silence of an empty home, the sounds of emptiness didn't stand out.

When Yenna called Andrew to come back to Brazil for an extended dig, Andrew entrusted Mack to Spencer and didn't really think much of it. Like any other trip, Andrew returned tired and dusty and semi-successful. The only difference was the barrenness of the house when he came back.

The next morning, Mack greeted him brightly with breakfast in bed he'd made himself. "Hey, Dad. Spencer said you came home last night."

Andrew smiled and blinked the sleep out of his eyes. "Yeah. I came to see you, but you were already asleep."

"The toast is kinda burnt," Mack apologized. Things cluttered in the bottom of the machine, preventing it from working properly. Suzanne had always cleaned out the toaster.

"I like my toast a little burnt," Andrew said and took a bite. "Especially with jelly."

Mack grinned. "Me too."

Maybe it wasn't a big deal in the grand scheme that Andrew didn't know how his only son liked his toast, but Andrew suddenly got the inkling he wasn't a very good father.

His biggest mistake was thinking that because Mack read a lot of books, he was quiet, well-behaved, and easy to control. He was in fact a constant blur of energy. At ten, Mack seemed to have more hair than he had head to hold it, more energy than his body could contain, and more imagination than he had breath for the stories he told. He was never, in Andrew's experience, not making sound. Even when he read his adventure books, he liked to act out the scenes, punch and kick at the air, make sounds and say things like, "Take that, natives!"

So Andrew recognized, in the haze of his grief, that Mack's sudden quiet compliance was potentially alarming. Mack lay down in the middle of the ocean of Andrew's perpetually empty bed, curling in the place he'd be were both of his parents there. He hadn't done it since he was five. Andrew realized this was probably an important moment, one his son would no doubt look back on in the years to come: how his father dealt with the death of his wife, Mack's mother. It was a lot to live up to.

"Do you miss your mom?" he asked.

Mack leaned over and took a piece of Andrew's toast. He nibbled the edge. "Yeah. I miss you too."

"Oh. I'm sorry. I'm guess I'm never here that often, huh."

"No. Can I come with you sometime?"

"Mack, that's not a good idea."

"Why not?"

"It's dangerous," Andrew sighed. "People get hurt." He bought himself a moment of silence by biting into a strip of bacon. It didn't taste half bad.

"Mom was here when she got hurt."

Andrew did not want to start crying in front of his son. "Mack..."

"It's not your fault, you know. I mean, it probably woulda happened if you were here. That's what accident means. It means these things just happen... accidentally."

Andrew shifted the breakfast tray aside and gave his son an awkward one-armed hug. "I just want to keep my family safe, Mack. You understand that, right?"

"Yeah. Me too. But you can't stop accidents."

Andrew kissed Mack's forehead and for the first time in about two years, Mack didn't squirm away. His son was smart, Andrew realized, and maybe just like Andrew, worrying about things he couldn't control. The difference being, Mack didn't let the worrying stop him from doing anything, and he certainly didn't let the worry control anyone else's life.

Andrew had always been a scholar, with good grades and high praise from all who knew him. But he was getting schooled by his son, and he couldn't help but wondering how much more he'd have to learn.


End file.
